The Best Experiences Come from Empowered Teams
The best experiences come from gyms that have empowered their teams to listen, help and build community.
Tell Us About Your Team at McKinsey
It’s very global. We have colleagues with fitness and wellness experience and expertise across continents. We also have colleagues with the most relevant functional expertise to the sector and in many cases, with past experience in fitness – for example, having worked in areas such as pricing and revenue management, artificial intelligence, innovation and product design.
What’s the Scope of Your Work?
We conduct research – including our annual Future of Wellness report – covering the US, UK, Brazil, China and Germany. It monitors the evolution of how consumers interpret overall health and wellness – not just movement, but also beauty, sleep, rest, recovery and nutrition – and looks at how that’s changing, both in terms of attitudes and behaviours.
How Embedded Are You in the Sector?
We do a lot of consultancy work for individual clients: there are a number of fitness chains that – faced with increased competition over the last 10 years – have felt on the back foot. They come to us to establish the best ways to respond to the rapid growth of competition – whether that be digital disruptors or operators launching new health club business models.
What Does Your Consumer Insight Tell You?
When we talk to fitness consumers for our research and insight work, there’s a very clear recognition and understanding of there fundamentally being two tiers in the health club sector: firstly value propositions – relatively low prices with simpler offerings – and then premium options. They don’t see four or five tiers in the market as some operators do.
How Can Investors and Operators Be Sure About a Value Proposition?
In the world of discretionary offerings and increasingly competitive catchment areas, operators must earn being someone’s choice. If they offer an inferior value proposition – the same product, or at least with no discernible difference, for a higher price – of course they’ll have a difficult time winning.
What Trends Has Your Research Identified?
The lines are now blurred between the different dimensions of wellness. From movement to recovery, wearables to nutrition, people don’t make one choice. They bring things together to enhance their outcomes.
Are Operators Responding to These Trends?
In aggregate they’re doing OK, but there’s still so much more that can be done to drive the industry forward.
What’s Your Advice When It Comes to AI?
In the fitness sector, there’s an opportunity to become less ‘push, push, push’ and more ‘pull when you need me’.
What Other Opportunities Do You See?
The human component is really important; the best experiences come from gyms that have empowered their teams to listen, help and build community.
What Motivates You Personally?
Consulting is a fascinating profession – every day, I get to help fantastic companies and people achieve their objectives – and fitness and wellness in particular have always been a personal interest.
For more insights, visit the full interview here.
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